Two Oklahoma churches and a mission group are building a house for a longtime missionary couple returning home from the Philippines.
Oakwood Christian Church in Enid and Lakewood Christian Church in McAlester are teaming on the project to construct the 2,300-square-foot home for Paul and Mary Wilson. Oakwood and Lakewood funded the materials for the project, while World Mission Builders, which is headed by Ed Thomas, has helped assemble the team of contractors that is working on the home.
Paul Wilson is a former youth pastor at Oakwood Christian Church, which his brother, Dr. R. Joe Wilson, founded. Joe Wilson now serves complementary roles as domestic project coordinator with World Mission Builders, which constructs churches and ministry-related buildings internationally, and as president of Church Growth Ministries, which assists local churches with their building needs.
“(Paul Wilson) sold everything and had a heart for missions and went into the mission field,” Joe Wilson told the Enid News & Eagle. “The end result was, when he reached retirement age, he ended up homeless, in the sense that he didn’t have a home to move back to.”
About 30 workers were busy last week framing the home, which sits on five acres in Enid.
Reached Monday, Joe Wilson said windows and doors are on the home, roofers were to arrive Tuesday, and he hoped by the end of this week the home would be ready for drywall work and insulation.
Oakwood Christian Church has provided food and lodging for the workers, who came from seven different states.
“We have been without a permanent home for 14 years, with mission work,” Paul Wilson told the News & Eagle. He had served most recently with Vision for Missions. “We’re very grateful that World Mission Builders saw our need, and Lakewood and Oakwood helped put up this building.”
I love this!
Churches taking care of missionaries!
There should be a lot more of this kind of thing.
But the American Church today is mostly not interested in reaching the 1000s of cultures/tribes/people-groups who don’t have the gospel, so they don’t really care about missionaries.
There are more people on Earth who know about Coca-Cola than know about Jesus, and Coke has only been around for 130 years.
I think that’s the worst scandal the Church ever had.
As I re-read my comment, I see that I need to clarify the fourth sentence.
Of course there are saints who really do care about missionaries, who pray and give and offer encouragement.
But not nearly enough.
There should be ten or twenty times as many missionaries around the world.
But the few who are serving often can’t get the support they need.
How could ten times as many get sufficient support?
The few who are serving have to spend a huge amount of time fundraising when they could be harvesting.
So some of the few quit, making the few fewer.
Again, I believe the worst scandal the Church ever had is the widespread apathy about unreached cultures/people-groups/tribes.
GOD deserves to be worshiped by people in all of those groups, but he is not, because the Church largely doesn’t care.